Commentary Culture Investigations

SACRAMENTO — California’s business climate continues to be subpar, with a continued exodus of businesses amid the usual array of high taxes, punitive regulations, and soaring cost of living. The recent CNBC ranking that placed the state’s business climate at 17 nationwide was shocking because it’s such an obvious outlier, as most other rankings place California far lower on the list. The state has its pluses, such as a booming tech sector and highly educated workforce, but billionaire job creators are fleeing in the face of a potential wealth tax that has qualified for the November ballot.
However, one might rank us, California lawmakers, at the very least should not be passing laws that make it even tougher to operate a business here. Yet, despite all the bad business news, CalMatters reported this week that Democratic Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry is advancing an antitrust bill that would give Californians a “new way to sue big companies.” Called the COMPETE Act, “Assembly Bill 1776 would expand California’s antitrust law to allow people and businesses that claim they’re harmed by a company’s attempts to stifle competition to sue in state court.”
California has myriad private right of action (PRA) measures that allow individuals — and not just district attorneys and the state Department of Justice — to file civil suits against companies for alleged wrongdoing. As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce correctly explains, “While … private rights of action sound like a helpful resource for consumers, the truth is that PRAs can lead to litigation abuse because plaintiffs’ lawyers are financially incentivized to file as many lawsuits as possible, placing monetary gain over properly addressing potential harms.”
While this legal tool is problematic in itself, it’s even more troublesome when legislation uses vague definitions that make it impossible for companies to know whether they are even following the statute. For instance, California had considered a “child protection” technology bill that would have allowed private lawsuits against firms that potentially caused “harms” to internet users, with “harms” being so broad that basically any tech company could be sued for almost anything. Likewise, AB 1776 can trigger a suit against virtually any business for “unreasonably” restraining trade or for an “attempt to monopolize any part of trade or commerce.” It amends California’s main antitrust law, known as the Cartwright Act, which already imposes stricter standards than federal ones.
The problem, of course, is that private business efforts to, say, expand their operations could conceivably be called “unreasonable” — or at least conceivable enough for a law firm or activist group to file a lawsuit. And Democratic officials — and a surprising number of populist Republicans, too — define the term “monopoly” in an overly broad way. The dictionary term means “when a single company or entity has exclusive control over a market, product or service.” Lawmakers often use it to mean a company that’s really big and dominant in an industry. In reality, the only true monopolies are the ones granted by the government (such as public utilities). Otherwise, upstart companies have no barriers to compete, so even a big corporate player doesn’t have “exclusive control” over a market. Granted, federal law uses the “market power” definition in its antitrust definition, but this California bill would move the state even further away from the dictionary concept of a monopoly by making it far easier to label a business practice as monopolistic.
So Katy bar the doors when it comes to lawsuits. As the California Chamber of Commerce explains in its opposition, the legislation “amends California’s Cartwright Act to include prohibitions on single-firm conduct, whereas the act has only covered the coordinated conduct of two or more firms since its passage in 1907.” As a result, “AB 1776 calls into question the legality of common business practices — such as unilateral price cuts, loyalty programs, rebates, licensing decisions, and efforts to undercut rivals — that are generally legal under federal law and viewed as good for competition and good for consumers. The sheer novelty of the bill’s ‘restraint of trade’ language will cause great uncertainty, will increase costs [and] will increase litigation.”
As the CalMatters article added, the legislation is causing discomfort for some Democrats, mainly moderates who fear that it would further undermine the state’s business community. Yet it passed the Assembly floor on a 44-17 vote, although 19 members didn’t vote on it, which signals concern among some members. It then passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 9-2 vote despite the committee chairman’s concerns. This could end up on the governor’s desk — and we’ll see what calculation Gov. Gavin Newsom makes, as he positions himself for a possible presidential run.
The bill is championed by progressives and unions that see it as a way to limit the expansion of big businesses. They even claim that the measure will boost competition, but it’s hard to see how it will do anything other than punish the best competitors — and it will also hobble small businesses. “Although AB 1776 may be framed as targeting large companies, its practical effects would reach the broader innovation ecosystem. Small-business developers, startups, and emerging technology companies rely on larger platforms for cloud infrastructure, digital marketplaces,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute explains.
In its defense of the bill, a coalition of labor and advocacy groups blasts the Chicago School of economics for historically undermining antitrust laws and claims that these conservative economists “de-emphasized market competition in favor of short-sighted economic gains.” In reality, this free-market school (based in the University of Chicago, with luminaries including Milton Friedman) “argued for a narrowly tailored enforcement standard focused on economic metrics such as price, output, and efficiency,” per the Chicago Booth Review.
They understood that the marketplace would sort through most of these issues, and that government shouldn’t be a tool for picking winners and losers. A lighter government touch actually yields the most competition. Yet California’s officials have consistently shown their hostility to freer markets, which is why our business climate continues to suffer. It will suffer even more if these antitrust crusaders give the trial bar another means to vastly expand their business.
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Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

If you travel to Newport, Rhode Island, and visit the Naval War College’s Museum, you will see exhibits related to Alfred Thayer Mahan, the second president of the war college who in the 1880s delivered his famous lectures on naval history and sea power — lectures that he transformed into his most famous book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 — to students in that very building. In all, Mahan wrote 20 books and hundreds of essays until his death in 1914, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War. He was the late 19th-early 20th centuries’ most influential proponent of sea power as a means of international preeminence. But his maritime geopolitical concepts still have relevance in the 21st century, nowhere more so than in the current Sino-U.S. rivalry.
Mahan was born in 1840 on the grounds of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where his father, Dennis Hart Mahan, taught civil and military engineering to students who would one day fight on the battlefields of the American Civil War. Alfred Thayer Mahan, too, served in that war aboard ships of the Union Navy. After the war, Mahan served on several U.S. warships, but his interests and talents were intellectual. His first book, The Gulf and Inland Waters (1883), analyzed Union naval operations during the Civil War. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), was his second book, and it gained for him national and international fame. The navies of the world took note, including the British and German navies, which proceeded to engage in a naval arms race that helped bring about the First World War, and the Japanese Navy, which won dramatic naval victories over Russia in 1904-05.
Mahan quickly became one of America’s most popular public intellectuals, writing books and essays on naval history, naval commanders, and strategic and geopolitical subjects. His “sea power” histories included the two-volume work The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire and Sea Power and its Relations to the War of 1812, also a two-volume work. Perhaps his most perceptive and predictive geopolitical books were Retrospect and Prospect,  The Problem of Asia, The Interest of America in International Conditions, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, and Naval Strategy. Mahan’s influence extended to the White House when his friend and admirer Theodore Roosevelt became president. Roosevelt, as a young man, had written a naval history of the War of 1812.
Not all of Mahan’s concepts apply to 21st-century naval warfare and geopolitics. He wrote before the age of naval air power and aircraft carriers, during the infancy of submarine warfare, and long before the age of nuclear-powered warships. But his appreciation of the importance of geography, naval bases, and relative population and natural resources, his assessment of the importance of naval chokepoints, blockades, command of the sea, his appreciation of the economic aspects of sea power, his concept of the oceans and seas as a “wide common,” and his understanding of the global balance of power remain relevant to 21st century geopolitics.
All you need to do is survey some of the 21st century’s books and essays on naval warfare and geopolitics to appreciate the continuing relevance of Mahan. Two of our nation’s most respected naval and geopolitical thinkers, James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, wrote a book in 2008 titled Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan. More recently, Benjamin Armstrong’s book 21st Century Mahan analyzed the continuing relevance of Mahan’s works to 21st-century global politics and naval warfare. In 2017, then Strategy Bridge associate editor B.A. Friedman wrote an article titled “Command of the Littorals—Insight from Mahan.” Patrick J. Garrity wrote an essay in April 2021, titled “Mahan, Chokepoints, and the Panama Canal.” A recent article in Geopolitical Monitor titled “The Strait of Hormuz and the Power of Chokepoints” cites Mahan. In January 2024, the Naval Institute’s flagship journal, Proceedings, published a piece by a retired Army officer titled “Mahan as Geoeconomic Strategist.”
But it isn’t even necessary to peruse the ubiquitous literature on Mahan’s continuing relevance to know that we are in the midst of a Mahanian revival. The geoeconomic importance of the Strait of Hormuz and Strait of Malacca, and other strategic chokepoints (Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Gibraltar, the Panama Canal) have been in the news recently, and the ongoing naval rivalry in the western Pacific is a defining feature of the U.S.-China Cold War II (to use Niall Ferguson’s phrase). American national security strategists rightly worry about shipbuilding disparities between the U.S. and China, as well as China’s control over rare earth minerals. China, meanwhile, understands its vulnerabilities surrounding the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca, which are key parts of its trade and energy lifelines. With tariffs and blockades, we have entered a new age of economic warfare and statecraft that Mahan viewed as being waged by sea power in its broadest sense.
A few months ago, Benjamin Jensen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute wrote that in its ongoing competition with China, the “United States needs to revisit the core relationship between economic and sea power proposed in the late nineteenth century by Alfred Thayer Mahan,” and praised the Trump administration for establishing a maritime network (“shipyards, dry docks, cranes, port infrastructure, maritime software, fuel logistics, mariners, component suppliers, autonomous systems, financing tools, and allied production networks”) that “can mobilize the capital, workforce, and manufacturing capacity needed to reconnect economic and sea power.” The Mahanian revival is geoeconomics at its best.
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The headline at Fox was right on the money. It read: “Rubio puts entire world on notice against rise of ‘poisonous’ far-left terror ‘masked as equality,’” with the subtitle “Scott Bessent and Stephen Miller to address terrorist financing and critical infrastructure at the summit.”
The Fox story reported:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Thursday that violent far-left political terrorism “can no longer be denied” as he urged more than 60 countries gathered in Washington to treat the threat as a global counterterrorism priority.
Speaking at the opening of a State Department summit attended by roughly 65 foreign delegations, Rubio said governments had spent too long overlooking what he described as a resurgence of transnational far-left extremist violence and called for greater international cooperation to counter it.
Rubio described radical leftism as “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice.”
In short, the secretary of state gets it.
What many in the world seem not to get is that what  Secretary Rubio is speaking of has been going on in this world for well over 100 years.
Back there in the Stone Age of 1999, out came a considerable volume titled, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.
With six distinguished authors, the book’s intro quite correctly records:
Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.
In other words, Secretary Rubio was simply reminding the world of what has been noted both previously and long ago in terms of the way the Leftist world works.
Not to mention that the secretary’s family is originally from Cuba. Rubio has previously told his family’s history with Cuba. While some critics have taken aim at his family history, the secretary said,
In February 1961, my mother took my older siblings to Cuba with the intention of moving back. My father was wrapping up family matters in Miami and was set to join them.
But after just a few weeks, it became clear that the change happening in Cuba was not for the better. It was communism. So in late March 1961, just weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, my mother and siblings left Cuba and my family settled permanently in the United States.
Soon after, Castro officially declared Cuba a Marxist state. My family has never been able to return.
That would be pretty definitive in terms of his Cuban family history in a communist state.
But the important point in today’s 21st-century world is the secretary’s point. That being that communism is “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice.”
And indeed, as The Black Book of Communism details in chapter and verse, the secretary of state understands that communism is exactly that “poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice.” And violent far-left political terrorism “can no longer be denied.”

Indeed, there is every reason for the entire world to be put on notice against the rise of “poisonous” far-left terror, “masked as equality.”
Time moves on. And it is entirely a fact that new generations can forget the lessons of previous generations. As a young American myself, I was reminded constantly by my parents that their generation had to struggle with the Great Depression and fight World War II. In short, my parents’ generation wanted to make sure their children’s generation did not forget the lessons they themselves had to learn.
All of which brings us back to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s putting the “entire world on notice against rise of ‘poisonous’ far-left terror “masked as equality.’”
The secretary’s “notice” is well taken. And should never be forgotten.
Secretary Rubio gets it.
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Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) is a badass who flew 30 combat missions more than 30 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom in the skies above Baghdad, Fallujah, and Tikrit.Now a congressman, Garcia confronts a greater adversary as a member of the House GOP’s China Accountability Task Force. He joins Peter and Eric on the most recent episode of The Drill Down to give us a preview of what the new majority will be focused on starting next year with respect to America’s “peer threat,” the People’s Republic of China.

Peter and Eric draw a parallel between stories you wouldn’t ordinarily put together: Hunter Biden’s laptop and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s doubletalk. Connections await on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. The online world is abuzz over journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter revelations. Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, turned over thousands of internal documents to Taibbi to show what happened at the social media giant in 2020 when Twitter took extraordinary steps to censor any mention or links to the New York Post’s devastating expose on the contents of an abandoned laptop computer previously belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

On this week’s show, Peter and Eric discuss the recent prisoner swap of basketball player Brittney Griner for a Russian arms dealer known as “The Merchant of Death.” Is a former Olympic medal-winner and LGBTQ activist worth unleashing one of Russia’s most notorious weapons purchasers? And when American citizens choose to travel to dangerous parts of the world and get in trouble overseas, do they have a right to expect help from America?

As the nation awakes from its turkey-induced tryptophan coma, Americans remain a thankful and forgiving people. The mood and the time are right to forgive those bad decisions – but on the most recent Drill Down episode, Peter and Eric reflect on what went wrong in America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the first step to granting forgiveness.Take Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), for example. In February of 2020, early in the outbreak, he first urged people not to mask unless they had symptoms. Two months later, he reversed himself and issued general masking orders regardless of any symptoms. Why?

The latest NewsBusters study of the guests interviewed on the “PBS News Hour” now shows the liberal-conservative disparity to be 5.2 to 1. Removing their government funding might have encouraged a deeper leftist tilt. But at least conservatives aren’t forced to support it. Our PBS analyst Clay Waters put together the latest study, and Senior Research Analyst Bill D’Agostino also joins the show. Remove elected and appointed officials from the tally and the liberal-conservative ratio becomes 8.8 to 1. There were 40 liberal journalists interviewed, and zero conservative journalists.  Liberals get most of the interviews, and they are typically very soft interviews. You could just go back to June 15, when PBS anchor Geoff Bennett welcomed on MS NOW pundit and professor Eddie Glaude to proclaim that patriotism and white supremacy are linked, that MAGA is like the Ku Klux Klan with “an evangelical twist.” There’s no reason to celebrate our 250th anniversary. That’s racist. On June 12, Bennett supportively interviewed leftist rock star Bruce Springsteen as he described his attacks on President Trump as “critical patriotism,” although he spent the Biden years doing a podcast with Barack Obama. This is how partisan PBS is — they turned their Springsteen interview into a special for the July 4 weekend, promoting his new museum in New Jersey. After the study period was over, PBS offered a very sympathetic interview to trans-man ACLU lawyer and activist Chase Strangio, as he lamented how the right-wingers are “demonizing” transgenders with their misinformation, which inspires violence. There’s no mention of violent crimes by transgender people.Actor Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page) performed an interview on formerly taxpayer-funded Pacifica Radio, promoting a documentary she narrates on how the animal kingdom underlines the wonders of queerness and gender fluidity, and the gender binary is a “quaint little myth.” As usual, reality was not allowed on the other side. Bill made a video medley of all the liberal journalists on TV claiming Graham Platner had something on his chest “resembling a Nazi tattoo,” as if it’s too crude to just call it a Nazi tattoo. Platner’s tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol in the same way that a Big Mac resembles a hamburger.Finally, Joy Reid suggested the doors of Hell were opening up for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. Why must liberals who don’t seem at all like churchgoers act like they know exactly were God is putting people? Enjoy the podcast below.